In an increasingly fast-paced economy, business organizations tend to idolize innovativeness, adaptability, and the ability to anticipate changes in the marketplace. Management thinking is permeated by concern with the present and the future, while the past is often treated as an inalterable monolith no longer worthy of attention. Companies are expected to move quickly, abandon outdated practices, and embrace the possibility of a new beginning.
Yet this apparent detachment from tradition tells only part of the story. Over recent decades, it has become increasingly common for companies to speak about their past in terms of “history” and “tradition.” They publish corporate histories, establish archives and museums, celebrate anniversaries, restore historic products, and invoke the experience of previous generations. Through these activities, companies make identity claims: they present themselves as stable, distinctive, experienced, innovative, socially responsible, or resilient.
This raises two central questions: Why and how does a future-driven company officially remember its past? And what does organizational remembrance do to the people working inside it?
My book, Organizational Cultures of Remembrance, explores these questions through a twelve-month ethnographic study conducted at the headquarters of AUDI AG in Ingolstadt. Rather than treating organizational memory as something a company simply possesses, I examine remembering as a collective, historically and culturally situated practice – something organizations and their members actively do.
Companies do not simply have a history
Every company has a past, but only a few actively make themselves a history. A corporate past does not automatically form a coherent narrative. Companies need to gather its surviving material traces, select particular events, interpret them from a contemporary standpoint, and establish relationships between past and present. Old documents, products, photographs, buildings, employee testimonies, and stories become meaningful only when people classify, preserve, present, and connect them.
At AUDI AG, this work was institutionalized in the corporate history department Audi Tradition. Its staff acted as an official carrier of organizational remembrance, reconstructing and representing the corporate past through what was internally called “tradition work.” This included maintaining archives and historic vehicles, producing publications and exhibitions, responding to research inquiries, organizing events, and supporting communications and marketing activities.
However, the resulting history was necessarily selective. Some periods, products, individuals, and achievements were repeatedly recalled, while others remained muted, peripheral, or forgotten. Official organizational remembrance therefore did not reproduce the past in its entirety. It transformed fragments of the past into representations shaped by present interests, institutional responsibilities, and expectations about the future.
The past is worked for present purposes
Companies rarely remember for remembrance’s sake. At AUDI AG, organizational remembrance served a wide variety of practical and symbolic purposes.
Historical evidence was retained to preserve physical proof of the company’s existence and development. Archives supported the legal protection of trademarks and product designs. Historical research enabled the organization to address earlier wrongdoing and questions of accountability. Public relations used the past to construct corporate identity claims, while marketing connected historic vehicles, technological accomplishments, and brand values to contemporary products.
The corporate past could also be used more directly, such as for exhibitions, publications, events, heritage products, visitor experiences, and the entertainment of customers and enthusiasts. Organizational remembrance thus operated in legal, economic, communicative, cultural, and identity-related domains.
The “how” of remembrance was strongly intertwined with the “why.” Different purposes of remembrance called for different cultural forms of remembrance: archival records, restored vehicles, historical narratives, museum displays, commemorative events, employee stories, visual symbols, and shared mental pictures of previous eras. Together, these practices and media permeated everyday business with selectively constructed references to the past.
No company speaks about its past with one voice
Although Audi Tradition was formally appointed to represent corporate history, it did not possess a monopoly over the past.
Communications, marketing, legal services, human resources, production units, active employees, former employees, brand enthusiasts, journalists, historians, clubs, and collectors all had their own interests in Audi’s history. Each group viewed the past through a particular thematic lens and selected those elements that appeared relevant to its own activities.
The corporate past therefore became the subject of multiple, sometimes competing discourses. Stakeholders collaborated, exchanged materials, and used one another’s expertise, but they also disagreed over historical interpretations, ownership, authenticity, and the appropriate use of heritage.
Rather than a single corporate memory controlled by one unified organizational actor, the study uncovered a network of remembrance formed by internal, semi-internal, and external stakeholders. Boundaries between these groups were permeable: individuals could belong to several mnemonic communities simultaneously, and interpretive authority had to be continually negotiated.
This matters because the handling of the past is inherently political. Whenever particular events are highlighted, silenced, reinterpreted, or instrumentalized, questions arise about whose version becomes visible and whose remains marginal. Interpretive dominance generally belongs to those who possess the resources, legitimacy, and cultural forms required to “work” the past most effectively.
Forgetting is the organizational default
The study also challenges the assumption that established companies naturally develop a strong historical consciousness over time.
For much of its existence, Audi operated in a default mode of organizational forgetting, interrupted only by occasional acts of remembrance. The systematic preservation and public representation of its history developed gradually through a historical process of evolution and differentiation.
Archives, collections, departments, professional roles, stakeholder networks, and increasingly sophisticated forms of remembrance emerged in different phases. Anniversaries, legal necessities, external criticism, competitive pressure, individual enthusiasm, and periods of economic prosperity helped advance the “tradition cause.”
This development was not linear. Organizational remembrance followed an economic cycle. During boom periods, demand for historical content increased, resources became available, and the purposes and forms of remembrance expanded. During “mnemonic recessions,” support declined and organizational forgetting regained ground.
Remembrance therefore did not contradict Audi’s future orientation. The past was cultivated when it could contribute to the organization’s continued existence, legitimacy, distinctiveness, and future success. In this sense, organizational remembrance was itself future-oriented.
Employees develop a historical consciousness
The second half of the study shifts from the formal business level to the sociocultural micro-level of organizational life.
Employees differ significantly in how much they know and care about their company’s past. Some develop a pronounced historical consciousness: a mental competence that allows them to connect earlier events, organizational changes, present conditions, and anticipated futures.
This historical consciousness is shaped by many factors, including organizational tenure, professional role, personal interest, encounters with historic products and places, contact with long-serving colleagues, corporate media, anniversary activities, museums, and participation in retrospective conversations.
Once developed, historical consciousness becomes a resource for interpreting everyday organizational reality. Employees use representations of the past to explain contemporary market conditions, trace the origins of working practices, make sense of persistent conflicts, and assess whether organizational life has improved or deteriorated.
Their historical interpretations do not necessarily correspond with official corporate narratives. Employees creatively rework the past in accordance with their own experiences and current concerns. Remembrance therefore operates both from the top down and from the bottom up.
Memory gives organizational identity a sense of concreteness
Organizational identity is often described as the collective answer to the question, “Who are we as an organization?” My findings show that this answer is inherently temporal.
Employees use the corporate past to identify with contemporary business success, process shifts in brand image, evoke a positive conception of the company, and cope with identity threats. Shared historical images act as contrast foils through which the present becomes understandable. Comparing “Audi today” with “Audi then” gives abstract identity claims a more concrete form.
Recollections of crisis, technological achievement, economic survival, ownership changes, and former brand identities enable employees to imagine the organization as a continuous collective self. The past provides a sense of stability, but it does not fix identity permanently. Historical representations remain malleable enough to be adapted to new situations and future concerns.
Organizational identity is therefore neither simply inherited from history nor freely invented by management. It emerges through an ongoing interaction between official representations, stakeholder interests, employee experiences, and changing contemporary needs.
What this means for managerial practice
Professional history management requires a long-term perspective. Companies that may eventually want to work with their past should begin retaining documents, products, images, and employee testimonies early. The remnants of today become the raw materials from which tomorrow’s corporate history will be constructed.
Organizations should also recognize that remembrance rarely produces immediate, directly measurable profits. Its potential value lies in longer-term effects: legitimacy, authenticity, employee identification, organizational stability, brand distinction, and a more meaningful understanding of collective work.
Historical accounts must be plausible to contemporary audiences, but their malleability has limits. Blatant deformation can be exposed by competing stakeholders and damage credibility. Consistency, methodological competence, transparency, and awareness of alternative interpretations are therefore crucial.
Most importantly, managers should not imagine that the past can be controlled by a single department. Different stakeholders possess different needs, resources, and versions of history. Effective organizational remembrance requires mapping these perspectives, building networks, negotiating conflicts, and understanding that putting the past in service of the present is always a political act.
The past is not the opposite of the future
The central conclusion of the book is that organizational remembrance is not a nostalgic retreat from contemporary business. It is a cultural process through which organizations selectively reconstruct their past to make claims about who they are, explain how they arrived in the present, and envision where they might go next.
The past does not speak for itself. It is preserved, forgotten, interpreted, disputed, materialized, and put to work by multiple actors. In doing so, it shapes corporate image, employee identity, organizational reality, and future strategy.
A company’s history is therefore not merely what happened before. It is what people in and around the organization continually make of what happened, and what that constructed past enables them to do in the present and future.
